Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/06/eerily-prescient-1950s-comic-b.html
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What if the answer to the Drake Equation is that most species die in their planetary cradle from greed and stupidity? What sorts of species would survive the industrial era burning of fossil fuels and the sudden climate shock? Could life on those same planets where most of the oil is burned up attain a second flowering of technic life millennia or billions of years after the first fatal flowering? Would they repeat their ancestors mistakes? bet there is some SF story with roughly this story…
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In today’s society, the alien child would be taken from their parents and the earth child vilified on social media.
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The treatment of refugees in the 1930s was still in recent memory of the Americans who created this comic. Now living memory of it has died out to the point where a SF allegory like this wouldn’t get through to at least a third of American adults.
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This comic has a very obvious anti-American anti-Earth bias.
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UFOyage of the Damned
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Why are the aliens on p. 1 wearing spacesuits and helmets, and Mitzl is only wearing a dress in p. 3?
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Reminds me of the short story Subcommittee, by Zenna Henderson.
A couple of points, and maybe I’m being too picky; although many of the pieces in the collection may be from the 1950’s, this particular one has publication information shown on the first page that says it was published in 1963; Strange Suspense Stories #66.
That being said, if I recall correctly, it’s an awfully lot like Zenna Henderson’s first published short story from 1951; “Subcommittee” (Magazine of F&SF). This story involves negotiations between humans and aliens, while the children are playing together unbeknownst to the adults (crawling under a fence to play, if I’m remembering correctly), and then the wives meeting and becoming friends. All the while, negotiations are breaking down between the husbands, who are the chief negotiators.
Still though, Henderson’s audience was a different one than this was intended to reach, and it’s a laudable message,
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with the alien super fast evolution abilities she has adapted to earth’s surface in the first generation. In the next generation they will adapt to kill us all.
Teenage misfits, juvenile delinquence, aliens, peace talks and moral panic:
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The children of immigrants assimilate quickly, I guess.
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The lettering is monospaced. Looks odd in a comic book.
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